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This awesome, mega-delicious homemade blueberry BBQ sauce recipe is one you have to try is you love your barbecue sauce to be on the slightly fruity and sweet side. I would include myself in that group, but it had better be an extremely balanced and tasty sweet BBQ sauce and not overpowering in the fruitiness department.

Thankfully, this blueberry BBQ sauce is wonderful, and has a little something for everyone – sweetness from the blueberries and brown sugar, tartness from the red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar, smokiness from the chipotle chiles, spiciness from the habanero, and full body and rich savoriness from the rest of the ingredients.

Sucklebusters – Texas BBQ Rubs, BBQ Sauces & Texas GunPowder! SuckleBusters is preferred by competition BBQ Cooks, and has won numerous awards including back-to-back 1st Place sauce wins at the American Royal – the World series of BBQ competitions.

Rudy Reviews is back with an offbeat review today. Why is this offbeat you may be asking, well today I’m reporting on a non-sauce review. Today I’ll be looking at almonds from Chile Spot. The Chile Spot is the creation of a gentleman named Jeff Porter from Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Jeff established his company in 2005 but his love for everything spicy began long before that while living in the finger lakes area of the state of New York. Jeff started out creating wing rubs and sauces as well as other sauces. He teamed up with fellow chileheads in the area and with some convincing, Jeff decided to take his passion to the next level.

The Chile Spot totes an impressive line of products which include: relish, hot sauce, jam, jelly, caramel corn among a variety of other items. Jeff gave me a little bit of a teaser in that he’s in the process of creating a whole milk cheddar cheese that has Moruga Scorpion in it. The Chile Spot will be at the New York City Hot Sauce Expo in April selling their products. Today I will be sampling their Ghost Pepper Honey Roasted Almonds…

Enough about how much sriracha is today’s big hot sauce trend. I know it is, you know it is, so enough gushing about how it’s taken the world by storm. Instead, let’s take a look at some of the artisan sauce makers and see what dazzling new directions they can take with the Thailand genre that goes by the name “sriracha”.

I was contacted by Alex Loukas of the Fix Hot Sauce Team based in Seattle, Washington, to cover their emerging sriracha product of the same name. According to their website, this is their story:

“Our Fix journey started in Vietnam, where we saw and tasted the difference of authentic, farm-fresh, and non-processed goodness. Our minds were blown. From then, we made it our mission to bottle the premium flavors of South Asia and bring it back home.

We used to be interested in average bowls of pho served with your average hot sauce. We want more. And you deserve more. Fix was born to bring the best damn hot sauce to America.”

Not only were they making the claim to have the best hot sauce, but I was also dying to know if I could ever truly love a sriracha sauce, so with my review of Fix Hot Sauce, it was a “double challenge accepted”. Read on to see what I thought…

Sucklebusters – Texas BBQ Rubs, BBQ Sauces & Texas GunPowder! SuckleBusters is preferred by competition BBQ Cooks, and has won numerous awards including back-to-back 1st Place sauce wins at the American Royal – the World series of BBQ competitions.

Order some of Steve’s new flavored popcorn (as mentioned in the podcast) or any other product on their shopping cart page.

If you’re a chilehead, a barbecuer, or just a general foodie, please consider helping out these fine folks. Let’s show Steve and Cathy that we are among the best and most supportive communities anywhere and that we take care of our own. Thank you!

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Episode #73 – Barbecue Chat with DivaQ Danielle Dimovski of BBQ Crawl

One of the First Ladies of the BBQ competition world, Danielle Dimovski, AKA DivaQ, joins Scott via Skype and talks about her smoker and grill preferences, outdoor cooking pet peeves and favorite flavor combos, and also discusses her TV career as host on the Travel Channel’s BBQ Crawl and contestant and barbecue judge on Destination America’s BBQ Pitmasters.

Sucklebusters – Texas BBQ Rubs, BBQ Sauces & Texas GunPowder! SuckleBusters is preferred by competition BBQ Cooks, and has won numerous awards including back-to-back 1st Place sauce wins at the American Royal – the World series of BBQ competitions.

Rudy Reviews is back with a sauce that has a motto of “If It’s Not Hot, It’s Not Right!” Today’s review is for Haba Haba “Dime” Hot Sauce made by Arthur Wayne Hot Sauce L.L.C., located in Missoula, MT. Started in 2014 by Arthur Schubert. Arthur started crafting his sauce back in 2007 after he peered into his refrigerator, noticed the amount of different sauces and said to himself (and me) “whoa, I can make sauce.” I assumed that the dime in the name of his offering was because he feels like it’s a “10” but in fact he gave the name because it took him ten times experimenting with his recipe until he was satisfied with the result.

Arthur Wayne L.L.C. currently has two sauces available in their range and will be adding three new sauces in 2015 – a scorpion pineapple, a mild jalapeno, and a huckleberry ghost pepper. On their website they have even offered to make a sauce for any occasion that you may have which I think is pretty neat. I’m not sure if custom labels are made but it’s still a nice service they offer…

You can now vote for who is going to enter the very first year of the Hot Sauce Hall of Fame!

The upcoming 3rd Annual New York City Hot Sauce Expo is hosting and presenting the official Hot Sauce Hall of Fame. The Hot Sauce Hall of Fame will induct 5 people that all have been instrumental in the fiery foods industry through the years. The induction ceremony will be presented live on the main stage at the NYC Hot Sauce Expo.

Rudy Reviews is back with another sauce to report on. Today I will be reviewing a sauce that came to me from the kind folks at Paulman Acre Smoked Pepper Sauces. Paulman Acre is located in Oceanside, California and is the creation of a gentleman by the name of Tim Paulman. The company started a Kickstarter campaign, and with much success they went into full operation in November of 2014.

Tim informed me that before starting his company, he made his living as a computer scientist for 20 years. He wasn’t content on spending the rest of his life in front of a computer screen; and after spending six years worth of whet, Tim is now confident in his products enough to offer them to the masses. Growing up in Appalachia, Tim told me that farming and food processing is a part of everyday life for most people to a certain degree so it only made sense to him to shy away from his computer career and step into the sauce industry. So today I will be giving my take on a sauce he named “Pinalava Sunshine.”

I received an informational packet with the package and something I found interesting was that they included a “Small Batch Facts” section. In it, it states that for every 60 pounds of peppers the Paulman Acre company uses, 10 pounds of sweet peppers and 5 pounds of habanero peppers are added and in time they achieve 25 gallons of product.

Tim also told me that he doesn’t like to refer to his offerings as “hot sauce” but rather “smoked pepper sauce.” Let’s see what’s in this rather attractive looking bottle, yeah?

Although the personal friendship between Al “Buddah” Goldenberg (of I Love It Spicy) and I hit a huge snag in 2013 (for personal reasons which I won’t get into here), he will always be a brother to me and I look forward to the day that we can be close again.

Also around that time frame, Al’s YouTube channel for I Love It Spicy unfortunately had gotten hacked, and three years of videos were deleted, which numbered in the hundreds. I know the loss of those were absolutely devastating to him, and I felt his frustration, anger and sadness.

Many of those videos that were wiped out had been recorded and uploaded by me for the ILIS website, as I was one of the many reviewers and contributors. I have a boatload of these video files scattered across untold DVD-R and hard drive backups from the past 5+ years. One day I may take a weekend to go through and collect all of them together for future uploading, just for old time’s sake.

But a trio of these older review videos had gotten unearthed when I recently searched a 1TB external drive for a logo file for an unrelated project. Of course, in traditional “stop what I’m working on to instead do something counter-productive” style, I had to pause to watch all of them. After doing so, it became a no-brainer to upload them to my channel for your pleasure…

In this special extra spicy hot, capsaicin-injected episode, Scott chats with Dr. Gillian Dagan of ABC Research Laboratories, and discusses topics such as what a food lab does and the rundown on HPLC testing to determine where things fall on the Scoville Heat Scale.

Sucklebusters – Texas BBQ Rubs, BBQ Sauces & Texas GunPowder! SuckleBusters is preferred by competition BBQ Cooks, and has won numerous awards including back-to-back 1st Place sauce wins at the American Royal – the World series of BBQ competitions.